About DC/OS

DC/OS is short for Datacenter Operating System, a distributed operating system using Apache Mesos as its kernel. DC/OS comes with a powerful CLI and a beautiful GUI, a package manager and many more things to run containers and big data workloads in production.

DC/OS is a distributed operating system based on the Apache Mesos distributed systems kernel. It enables the management of multiple machines as if they were a single computer. It automates resource management, schedules process placement, facilitates inter-process communication, and simplifies the installation and management of distributed services. Its included web interface and available command-line interface (CLI) facilitate remote management and monitoring of the cluster and its services.

When you’re operating a datacenter, there are a set of common operations that you do because you have to, not because you want to. In a single computer environment, your operating system automatically takes care of these things. When was the last time you had to manually tell your laptop which processor core to run your application on? For those of you who responded with anything other than “never”, there are some amazing computers at the Computer History Museum that you might want to check out.

On your laptop, the job of scheduling an application to a specific core is handled by the kernel. Abstracting this process out, the kernel manages all of the resources on your computer, including memory, disk, inputs, and outputs, etc. There’s no reason why a kernel must operate only on a single computer. Programs to manage resources across multiple computers can solve the same problem. In fact, this is what a container orchestrator does. It can act like a kernel for the combined resources of an entire datacenter instead of the resources of just a single computer.

At this point, the act of running an application on some resources is automated away. Unfortunately, that’s only one small piece of the puzzle. Our modern operating systems contain a plethora of software that is used to solve many other common computing problems and allows us to focus on doing actual work, rather than managing our computers. DC/OS includes these solutions to these common problems out of the box, whereas before you had to research solutions yourself and integrate them by hand into the computers in your datacenter.

"DC/OS allows our clients to harness the power of a data center operating system in a true open source fashion. It allows them to seamlessly transition their container backed applications into production without having to worry about the intricacies of building and managing large scale infrastructure."

DCOS Benefits

Run stateless and stateful workloads such as containers and big data, all on a single platform.

Easily deploy and operate complex datacenter services such as Spark, Kafka, Cassandra and more from our partner ecosystem.

Built on Apache Mesos and DC/OS, combining years of large-scale production experience and best practices.

Advanced operational features such as monitoring, security, compliance, and support.